The Comprehensive Law Movement: 

holisticLaw as a Healing Profession

Susan Daicoff, 2001

Florida Coastal School of Law

creative
 

 

 

 

 


What we are doing in the law is not working. Clients are unhappy with their lawyers, with the system, and with the outcomes of the process. Lawyers are extraordinarily unhappy or even impaired. Extralegal dispute resolution mechanisms in society have failed and society is overdependent on legal processes to resolve conflict. As a result, society in general is suffering from the effects of law’s adversarial, other-blaming, position-taking, and hostile approach to conflict resolution. Perhaps in response, a number of new approaches to law practice are currently emerging. These new approaches add more collaborative, comprehensive, healing, humane forms of law practice to the traditional forms. There are at least ten of these approaches, or "vectors," which are beginning to merge into a "comprehensive law" movement. The "vectors" intersect in two ways: all seek to optimize human psychological wellbeing and all focus on legal "rights plus" other, nonlegal concerns.

 

Click here for an Introduction to the Comprehensive Law Movement. 

 

 

Slides:  Click here to view a set of my Powerpoint slides on my current work-in-progress on "comprehensive law," which for me includes therapeutic jurisprudence, preventive law, TJ/PL, restorative justice, collaborative law, holistic law and lawyering, creative problemsolving, procedural justice, and some forms of alternative dispute resolution and mediation.

 

“Vectors” of the Movement:

Theory-Oriented Vectors:

Creative Problem Solving

Therapeutic Jurisprudence

Procedural Justice

Holistic Justice

Spirituality in Lawyering

 

Process-Oriented Vectors:

 

 

 

Links to websites of the "vectors:"

Restorative Justice: http://ssw.che.umn.edu/rjp

Therapeutic Jurisprudence: http://www.law.arizona.edu/upr-intj

Holistic Justice: http://www.iahl.org/index.htm

Creative Problem Solving: http://www.cwsl.edu/admissions/bulletin (and then choose McGill Center for Creative Problem Solving)

Collaborative Law: http://divorce.net